His replacement is a tough, faceless KGB apparatchik about whom almost nothing is known. Nothing--except, it would soon emerge, that he reveres the KGB, never resigned from the Communist Party, believes that snitches in the Soviet era were patriots and says a strong state is in Russia's ...
The Republican nominees from 2008 and 2012 had both run on a hawkish position against Russia (Mitt Romney had called the country America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe”). Now, on the fringes of the GOP primaries, there was a candidate opening up what was, from Putin’s standpoint, a much...